Can You Pet The Dog?

A tired joke. But let's see if there's any interesting insight to be found within it. Let's examine each word in turn:

"Can" - a defining quality of videogames is that they offer means to exert agency. Is it meaningful for a game to feature dog-petting if the dog-petting is compulsory, automatic, involuntary? "Can" here implies that the choice is offered to you. And that's an important emotional beat - if the dog wags his tail you want to know that you were the one to make that happen. Otherwise where is the satisfaction?

"You" - I started writing this post as a way of expanding on this post from earlier:

Implicit in the question is a conflation between "you" the player and "you" the character that is controlled within the game. A conflation that is simultaneously natural and fraught. I can't find the quote, but I recall someone talking about how when writing about videogames you naturally shift across all of first person ("I jumped up on the ledge"), second person ("you then need to find the key") and third person ("Lara Croft discovers the secret entrance"). It's worth noting the power that playing with the distance between player and character can have - the twist in Bioshock, the subtle shifting of viewpoint in Kentucky Route Zero, the reflection in the screen in Her Story.

"Pet" - As a English speaker living in the UK I have only encountered the verb form of "pet" within the context of "petting zoo", the phrase "heavy petting", and the question "can you pet the dog?". It's meaning has always felt a little mysterious to me. I mean, I understand that it's physical touch, intimate and affectionate in nature. But the similarity of the word "pet" to the word "pat" makes me feel it is limp and slight contact, unsatisfying to the giver and to the receiver. As an English person, I would much more naturally say "Can you stroke the dog?". And on looking up if this was a me thing or an English thing I saw that Irish folk might well say "Can I rub your dog?" - a funny phrase to my ears. So "pet" is a reminder of the way videogame culture can spread a certain kind of implicit Americanism world-wide.

"The" - Implying that there is only one. A nice humorous simplification. Well of course there's a dog in your game about X. And of course there's only one. But also, if you are making a game, it's interesting to reflect how once you have made one dog, the second dog becomes much cheaper. A third dog, well, that's cheaper again. And the tenth dog! The dogs start becoming almost free at this point. But at a certain point you start having so many dogs that you have to start doing dog-specific optimisations to keep going. All this reminds me of Bennett Foddy writing about numbers in game design:

As I play through the latest warmly received game that has Good Game Design I always find myself wondering: could it be that zero, one and infinity are the only reasonable numbers in game design?

(https://thatsnot.fun/zk-map-for-stranger/)

"Dog" - Of course, you can pet other creatures. Much fun has been made taking the format and applying petting to other objects. But when I think of this, I mainly think of a blog post I remember reading from Matthew Inman, the former content marketer who does The Oatmeal, writing about how it's important to follow your creative impulses even if they're not perfectly aligned with the market, and giving as an example making a comic about dogs when the common wisdom is that the internet prefers cats. Which wasn't a hypothetical example, he did make that comic, and he does seem to be someone who owns dogs and does not own cats - we can imply that his personal interests really do align with dogs. Of course, it was his card game Exploding Kittens which really pulled in the big bucks and got a Netflix deal, so... I'm not sure if the lesson really applies. Maybe we should be following the most tightly commercial thing, rather than trying to follow our own interests. Or maybe we should try to avoid rewarding anyone who has this kind of deeply cynical instinct, even if in this particular instance it does align with our interests. A stand against "selling out", I guess you could call it, if one wanted to assume that people naturally start from a position that is not sold out, and are only later tempted to it.